Madame Nhu

Tran Le Xuan (22 August 1924-24 April 2011), later known as Madame Nhu, was First Lady of South Vietnam from 26 October 1955 to 2 November 1963 as the sister-in-law of the celibate President Ngo Dinh Diem and the wife of his brother, security chief Ngo Dinh Nhu. She was widely unpopular due to her arrogance and her mockery of the Buddhist monks who self-immolated, and she lived in exile in France after her husband and brother-in-law were killed in the 1963 South Vietnamese coup.

Biography
Tran Le Xuan was born in Hanoi, French Indochina in 1924, and she came from a wealthy aristocratic family with close ties to the French colonial government; her mother was the cousin of Emperor Bao Dai, the French puppet ruler of Vietnam. In 1943, she married Ngo Dinh Nhu and converted to Catholicism from Mahayana Buddhism. In 1955, her brother-in-law Ngo Dinh Diem became the first President of South Vietnam, and, because of Diem's celibacy, Madame Nhu was considered to be the First Lady of South Vietnam. She was highly influential in the government, and she was infamous for her harsh and incendiary comments against Buddhist demonstrators (calling their self-immolations "barbecues", saying that she clapped when they burned themselves, and offered to provide matches to any more monks who sought to burn themselves) and US influence in the country. In September 1963, she left the country on a goodwill tour to Europe and the United States, arriving in the US on 7 October. She claimed that she was being unfairly used as a scapegoat for the situation in South Vietnam, that all the people around President John F. Kennedy were "pink" (secret socialists), and that American liberals were worse than communists. Nhu's insults during the visit convinced Kennedy to support the 1963 South Vietnamese coup of 1-2 November, which led to Diem and Nhu being overthrown and executed. Nho blamed the US for the coup, saying that the US was worse than Judas, and that she would refuse to live in a country which stabbed her in the back. She permanently moved to Paris with her family, as their valuables back in South Vietnam were confiscated, and the military junta exiled them. She died in Rome in 2011.